Please share your immediate response to the image before reading the photographer’s intent (obscured text below) or other comments. The photographer seeks a genuinely unbiased first impression.
Questions to guide your feedback
How does the selected area of focus make you feel. Is there anything distracting in this image?
Other Information
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Image Description
Pinstripes
It’s a great big world out there. Here in Montana we are proud of our big sky, tall mountains, vast prairies, wild animals and glorious wildflowers. I’ll tell ya what though, if you can peel your eyes away from the more attention-grabbing aspects of life in Montana, you might find a tiny little world vying for your attention.
Take this wee little wildflower for example. My photograph makes it appear to be quite large, but this incredibly stunning flower is smaller than the diameter of a dime! It is appropriately named Spring Beauty. From the twisted pink anthers, to the pin-striped petals that always remind me of peppermint ribbon candy, this mini-harbinger of Spring is about as dressed up as any flower you’ll find in the forest. You have to look hard though. From a distance, they appear as minuscule white dots on the ground. You have to get down on their level for their beauty to become fully apparent.
Technical Details
Nikon D850
Sigma 105 mm Macro
ISO 160, f/7.1, 1/200th
39 images stacked in Helicon Focus
I created a mask in Lightroom to enhance sharpness and texture on the flower, and then inverted it to darken and further soften the background.
Specific Feedback
I’m always open to all critique but am particularly interested in the aesthetics and emotion in this image.
First impression – Lovely!! I like the DOF but it feels a little on the dark side and slightly crowded in the frame for the soft subject, but those are just preferences. My eye is pulled down a little by the two stems exiting at the lower corners.
After reading the shaded text: nothing different in the reaction – it seemed it was something quite small. But it is a lovely and worthy subject, quite able to hold its own against your scenery!
Spring beauties are all over here, too. Quite the photogenic little things although they can be messy and difficult to isolate. You’ve done well with that here, but like Diane, I think this is a bit dark for my taste. The framing is good and the focus point is where it needs to be. I like the furled blossoms all around the open one. Other than the overall underexposure, it’s a fine portrait of this spring ephemeral.
I love the Spring Beauty flower. I have them all over my woods and it’s rare to find one as pretty as the one you photographed.
I like how you focused on the open flower and placed it at the top of your frame. I also like the bokeh. It might be personal preference, but I find the bud intersecting the open flower on the right distracting. You might want to consider ‘digitally pruning’ the bud out. You also might consider cropping the bottom as it doesn’t add to the photo.
The strips on the Spring Beauty flowers run from a very pale pink to vivid pink like the one you photographed. Having seen a wide gamut of these flowers I don’t know what you photographed. But, the anther appears to be slightly over saturated to me.
With this flower growing so close to the ground, it’s challenging to photograph. With the tack sharp focus on the opened flower, you did a nice job in capturing this small beauty.
It’s a great big world out there. Here in Montana we are proud of our big sky, tall mountains, vast prairies, wild animals and glorious wildflowers. I’ll tell ya what though, if you can peel your eyes away from the more attention-grabbing aspects of life in Montana, you might find a tiny little world vying for your attention.
Paul, Glad you took the opportunity to share this little beauty with us, it’s a first for me so thanks for that!!
Love the pinstripes, the texture, color and the composition!
The only thing that comes to mind for me is to add a touch of exposure to the petals at the top with an exposure mask and a low opacity brush, it wouldn’t take much to make this stand out nicely! Maybe consider leaving the exposure as is for the bottom portion of the flower though.
@Diane_Miller@Kris_Smith@David_Starr Thanks for the tips. I lightened it a bit…although my tastes have recently drifted toward darker edits. I tried to clone out the bud behind the flower, but it was stubborn and left a residual dark spot. I’ll try more on that later. I did remove the hanging bud on the right.
I also desaturated the colors a bit, especially the pink. I’ll also include a single image from the stack so you can see how it was cropped. I was right at the minimum focus distance for this lens which is just about 2 inches past the hood. In hindsight, I should have moved the camera up a bit so there was a tad more negative space above the flower.
I do love the darker images you’ve done recently, and think there must be a way to get a similar effect here, but I can’t think of a useful suggestion just now. And now I like the darker BG of the original but the lighter main flower of the RP. Or better, just back off that top gradient a little? But I’m just me and it’s a big planet. It would be easy to add canvas to the top and let content-aware fill do the work.
You did have a lot to clean up. I’ll usually shoot a set then take out the nail scissors and tweezers and do some pruning and try another set. That can go on for quite a while, and then sometimes I decide the first one was best. And more than once, I cut the wrong branch.
I like it @Merv! The dark area on the petals was caused by a radial gradient I had used. I think it clipped the top petals a bit. I should have thought to lighten them up. Thanks for the input!
Hi Paul,
I posted your image with the bud removed. It’s personal preference if this is a better image or not.
Digital pruning can be a bit challenging. I have found that images with a soft bokeh, like yours, it’s better to use the healing brush tool. On your image, I masked the flower petals nearest to the bud then inverted the mask to protect the petals. I used the healing brush tool in the replace mode to prune the bud. In total, I didn’t spend more than a couple of minutes editing you photo.
That’s really clean! It does look great. I can’t decide if I like the depth it adds to keep it there or not. The main take away for me is that I need to learn Photoshop! The only thing I use it for now is to run the Ministars action for star reduction on my Milky Way images. Thanks for taking the time on this!
